Russian
President Vladimir Putin intervened militarily in Syria in September
2015 by launching what the Russian media dubbed Operation Vozmezdie
(Retribution). He did so under the guise of joining the global effort
to defeat terrorism. His chief of staff Sergei Ivanov stated at the
time: “The
military goal of the operation is strictly to provide air support for
the [Syrian] government forces in their fight against Islamic State.”
Putin himself claimed his intervention was intended to prevent “these
criminals who already tasted blood” from returning “back home and
continue their evil doings.” But
the Russian president’s real aim was to bolster the beleaguered
Bashar al-Assad regime in the western corridor where most Syrians
live. His intervention was essentially a counter insurgency operation
against an array of Sunni rebel forces fighting against the
government in Damascus, not a counter terrorism campaign against ISIS
forces located primarily to the east.

Russian forces deployed advanced
“Vladimir” tanks, cruise missiles, aircraft, including long range
strategic bombers, and their only aircraft carrier, the Admiral
Kuznetsov, to repulse an alliance of Sunni rebels that was advancing
on the coastal strongholds of the Alawite-dominated Assad regime. In
furtherance of this policy, the Russians also carried out an
indiscriminate bombing campaign in Sunni rebel-controlled eastern
Aleppo that has been blamed for vast numbers of civilian deaths.

But Putin’s actions have not
made his citizens safer, on the contrary they have put them squarely
in the crosshairs of the terrorists. By intervening in Syria on
behalf of a bloody dictator whose forces have killed far more people
than ISIS, Moscow has incurred the wrath of Sunni jihadist groups,
including ISIS and former Nusra Front now known as Jabhat Fateh al
Sham. ISIS threatened Moscow for its actions and stated: "You
will not find peace in your homes. We will kill your sons ... for
each son you killed here. And we will destroy your homes for each
home you destroyed here."

Such threats were soon translated
into action and Russia has increasingly been made a primary
target of global jihad with a rising number of Islamist terrorist
plots and attacks focusing on Russian targets at home and abroad. The
most notable example of this terrorist blowback has been the downing
of a Russian civilian airliner over the Sinai Desert last October
leading to the death of 224 people on October 31, 2015. The Metrojet
airliner was downed by a bomb planted on board by an ISIS affiliate
in Egypt and was Russia’s worst aviation disaster. There have been
other attacks as well, most notably a series of ISIS inspired
bombings in the southern Russian province of Dagestan as well as the
beheading of a Russian child by an Uzbek nanny, the shootings of
police officers in Moscow and Nizhni Novgorod, and a foiled attempt
in November to carry out a Paris style mass shooting attack at malls
in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The killing of the Russian
ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov on Monday by a gunman who shouted
“Aleppo” and “revenge” shows that terrorists who blame Russia
for mass civilian deaths and for helping prop up the hated Alawite
dictator Assad certainly have their own plans of retribution to
punish Putin for his incursion in Syria. With thousands of foreign
fighters from Russia fighting in Syria and Iraq, there is significant
risk this terrorist blowback will get much worse as ISIS’s
“Caliphate” begins to collapse. The net result of Putin’s
adventurism in the Middle East would sadly seem to be less security
at home for citizens of a country who originally vote him in to power
based on his promises to protect them from Chechen terrorism.